A Liberian warlord’s unlikely path to forgiveness.

On a recent Sunday morning in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, a few dozen people gathered in a tin-roofed church to hear a former warlord preach. His name is Joshua Milton Blahyi, but most Liberians still know him by his nom de guerre from the nineteen-nineties: General Butt Naked. A burly forty-five-year-old with a head shaped like a cannon shell, Blahyi took the stage wearing black dress pants and a cream-colored shirt. He has delivered sermons across West Africa about the power of forgiveness and the perfidy of Liberian politicians, but one of his favorite topics is himself. “In South Africa I was privileged to preach to parliament,” he told his congregation. “Hallelujah! It can happen to you!” A slip of paper fell from his Bible, and a worshipper hurried to pick it up. “Keep it as a souvenir,” Blahyi said.

In 1980, Samuel Doe seized the Presidency of Liberia in a coup. Blahyi claims that he later became Doe’s spiritual adviser, and that he used witchcraft to help Doe win a second term. (Doe also used more mundane methods, such as burning his opponents’ ballots.) On Christmas Eve, 1989, Charles Taylor, a former Liberian government official, invaded from Ivory Coast with a hundred soldiers, and the country plunged into civil war. There was a ceasefire in 1996, and Taylor was elected the next year. Then, in 1999, another rebel group invaded from Guinea, sparking a second conflict, which lasted until Taylor was ousted, in 2003.

During the nineties, most of Liberia was controlled by rival militias. In the bush, they battled for control of diamond fields and gold mines; in Monrovia, they fought gun battles in the streets. Reporting to the militia leaders were dozens of rebel commanders, many of whom adopted outlandish names: Chuck Norris, One-Foot Devil, General Mosquito, and his nemesis, General Mosquito Spray. Blahyi was active for about three years, and, as General Butt Naked, he led several dozen soldiers—the Naked Base Commandos—who fought mostly in Monrovia. Many of the soldiers were children, and, like their commander, they often wore nothing but shoes and magic charms. In a distorted emulation of animist tradition, Blahyi claimed that this made them “immune to bullets.”

On April 6, 1996, in Monrovia, Taylor’s soldiers attempted to arrest the leader of the militia with which Blahyi was affiliated. Blahyi and other rebel commanders fought back, leading to one of the most ferocious battles of the war. About half of Monrovia’s residents were displaced. As the city erupted into chaos, a bystander saw Blahyi standing naked atop a truck, holding an assault rifle in one hand and a man’s severed genitals in the other.

All told, some two hundred thousand people were killed in the Liberian civil war. When hostilities finally ended, in 2003, the peace agreement called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The group convened three years later, in a compromised state: none of the members had served on such a commission before, and they lacked the power to bring binding charges. Still, the proceedings were broadcast live, across the country, on radio and TV. Blahyi was the first former warlord to testify. Wearing an immaculate white dress shirt, he spoke with surprising candor. “I want to say sorry,” he said. As photographers’ cameras clicked in the gallery, he hung his head and appeared to weep. “Everything I was doing was devilish, was wrong, was inhuman.”

One of the commissioners asked Blahyi to estimate the number of people he had killed.

“If I were to calculate—if you’re talking about April 6th, or throughout the war, or every evil I have done, it should not be less than twenty thousand,” Blahyi said.

During the course of two hours, he described his role in the war. He said that he used human sacrifice and cannibalism to gain magical powers. “I needed to make human sacrifices to appease the said deities, or the gods,” he said. “Every town I entered . . . they would give me the chance to do my human sacrifices, which included innocent children.” He then told the story of his conversion to Christianity, which took place shortly after the April 6th battle. The commissioners, apparently enthralled by Blahyi’s account, challenged few of his claims. One of them commented, “You have a lot of good leadership qualities.”

Blahyi’s testimony was front-page news in Liberia. Strangers hugged him on the streets of Monrovia, and journalists came from all over the world to interview him. The Daily Mail ran a profile under the headline “Face to Face with General Butt Naked—‘The Most Evil Man in the World.’ ” Vice featured Blahyi in a lurid travel documentary called “The Vice Guide to Liberia,” which has been viewed more than ten million times on YouTube. Bojan Jancic, the pastor of an evangelical church in the East Village, saw the video and later became one of Blahyi’s benefactors. Blahyi has written five books; a memoir titled “The Redemption of an African Warlord” was published in 2013 by a small Christian press. In the foreword, Jancic wrote, “Not since the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the Road to Damascus have I ever heard a conversion story more radically compelling.”

In the tin-roofed church, Blahyi neared the end of his sermon. The previous night, he had watched a documentary about Whitney Houston. “She was one of the world’s greatest pop stars,” he said. “But what struck me was Kevin Costner, one of her co-stars. He said, ‘She suffers a complex. She always talk in her mind: “Will I really be accepted by the people?” ’ Even me, that everyone look at today as a wonderful preacher—as a brave man who did all those things in the past, as a hero—I still suffer.”

Blahyi stalked the aisle, beating his chest, his shirt translucent with sweat. “I am a bit different from many people,” he said. “Even though it is impossible, I still know that Jesus love me.” He wiped his face with a white cloth. “When Jesus met me, I was wicked on the street and destroyed the life of an innocent child, and He called me His son!”

Not long ago, I spent a week with Blahyi in New Georgia Estate, a suburb of Monrovia. His house is mustard-colored and modest, with a flickering power supply and no running water. One morning, Blahyi decided to play in a pickup soccer game. He donned a white jersey and sat on a couch in the living room while his teen-age nephew, Emmanuel, who serves as his factotum, laced up his cleats. Then Ernest Nelson, one of Blahyi’s several half brothers, drove him down the cratered dirt roads of the neighborhood in a silver S.U.V. Blahyi leaned out the window, grinning and waving at pedestrians like a visiting dignitary.

The soccer game was already in progress, but Blahyi jogged onto the field without waiting for a substitution. He was one of the few players with his own shoes; the others shared, swapping during substitutions. A torrential rain began to fall, turning the field into a boggy sump. Blahyi jumped for a header, missed, and fell in the mud.

Near the end of the game, with the score tied, he planted himself in front of the opposing goal. He was flagrantly offsides, but no one stopped him. He captured a loose ball, pivoted, and levered the ball past the goalie. Minutes later, he scored again. When the final whistle blew, he jogged to the center line and stamped victoriously in the mud.

Most people in Liberia are Christians—the country’s founders were freed slaves from the United States, and its capital was originally named Christopolis—but mainline Protestantism has long coexisted with indigenous beliefs. Blahyi has relatives in Sinoe County, a sparsely populated region in southern Liberia. As a child, he says, his father took him there and left him with “the elders,” who subjected him to an initiation ritual in the forest. According to “The Redemption of an African Warlord,” which often reads like a fable, he subsisted on chalk, flew through the air, and was anointed high priest of a secret society—a post that required him to perform monthly human sacrifices.

Harrison Shine Challar, another of Blahyi’s half brothers, told me that he had been unaware of Blahyi’s life as a priest; as far as Challar knew, Blahyi was merely a rebellious youth. Their mother would give him money to buy food for the family, and he would disappear into the streets of Monrovia for weeks at a time. He left school after the third grade, and later sold Kool-Aid and chicken soup at a local market, wearing “a purple necktie, purple shirt, purple trousers, and purple shoes” so people would recognize him. He then moved on to drug trafficking and robbery. Sometimes, Challar said, he and Blahyi worked together. A Nigerian soldier once asked Blahyi to help him gain spiritual powers; Blahyi prescribed a “witchcraft treatment”—an enema—and while the soldier was indisposed Challar stole his money.

One afternoon, Blahyi and I took a taxi into central Monrovia. As we inched through traffic, Blahyi used an iPad to take selfies in various poses: dazzling smile, thoughtful gaze, pensive frown. We stopped in front of a dilapidated three-story apartment building. In 1996, Blahyi had commandeered the building, confining the residents to the servants’ quarters to make room for his troops. At the top of a dank flight of stairs, a gray-haired woman greeted Blahyi with a smile and a hug. Her son joined her at the door. “He’s a good friend,” he said quietly, looking at Blahyi. “He took care of the area.” Later, in the taxi, Blahyi’s mood soured. “I did not take good care of them,” he said. “I took their house. They don’t want to say anything bad, but I was very mean to them.”

Several blocks away, near the Mesurado River, we stopped in front of an abandoned building pitted with bullet holes. Low clouds the color of quicksilver obscured the sky. Several men sat around a fire; one of them, in a wheelchair, greeted Blahyi as “General.” Blahyi walked past them to a crumbling stone wall overlooking a bridge.

“I met Jesus here for the first time,” he said. In his memoir, Blahyi describes killing a child near this bridge by “opening the little girl’s back and plucking out her heart.” Her blood was still on his hands, he told me, when he heard a voice. “When I looked back, I saw a man standing there. He was so bright, brighter than the sun.” The voice told him, “Repent and live, or refuse and die.”

“I wanted to continue fighting, but my mind never left this person—how bright he was, how passionate his words,” Blahyi continued. He soon quit fighting, leaving his child soldiers to fend for themselves, and began sleeping on a pew in a nearby church. The pastor there gathered his congregation, and they asked God to strip Blahyi of his demonic powers. The next day, Blahyi went to see his commanding officer, handed over his weapons and amulets, and said, “My new Commander is Jesus Christ.”

In 1996, when Charles Taylor declared that he had been born again, it was widely perceived as a cynical ploy. Some are similarly skeptical about Blahyi’s conversion. Nicholai Lidow, an independent scholar who wrote a doctoral dissertation at Stanford about Liberian rebel groups, told me that Blahyi is “a brilliant self-promoter who translated his notoriety from the war into personal gain.” But many Liberians believe that a warlord’s public conversion, whether self-interested or not, will do more to heal the country than any prosecution could.

During the Napoleonic Wars, so-called “powder monkeys,” some as young as ten, helped arm cannons for the British Navy. In 1863, Congress awarded the Medal of Honor to a thirteen-year-old Union soldier. After the Second World War, though, international norms began to shift; by 1977, the Geneva Conventions prohibited recruiting anyone under the age of fifteen into an armed force. Nevertheless, child soldiers continue to be used throughout the world. Militia commanders consider them ideal fighters—cheap, nimble, and psychologically malleable.

As many as twenty thousand child soldiers fought in the Liberian civil war, serving as spies, sentries, and human minesweepers. Many were forcibly conscripted, sometimes at gunpoint. Others joined out of desperation, seeking food or physical protection. Many of Blahyi’s “small soldiers” were as young as nine. According to some accounts, Blahyi mashed cocaine into their food and showed them Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, meant to demonstrate that “war was just an act.” He told me, “I tried to uproot the fear of death.”

After the civil war ended, many child soldiers felt lost. “They got used to getting things by force, through violence,” Sondah Geepea-Wilson, the director of a program in Liberia that works with former fighters, told me. “Getting back into the community was a problem.” The U.N. tried to rehabilitate them through training programs. Some, fearing stigma, refused to participate; others were taught masonry or carpentry, jobs that hardly existed in Liberia’s shattered economy. Today, several thousand former child soldiers live in ghettos in Monrovia. Many are addicted to drugs, and the vast majority show signs of P.T.S.D.

In 2007, Blahyi founded Journeys Against Violence, a rehabilitation program for young men who fought in the Naked Base Commandos and other units. J.A.V. rented a bright-yellow cinder-block house in a Monrovia suburb called Chocolate City. Eighteen young men, all in their twenties or thirties, lived there, sharing three small bedrooms crammed with bunk beds. Ernest Nelson, Blahyi’s half brother, was J.A.V.’s supervisor; Blahyi’s mother worked as its cook; one of the program’s drivers was Blahyi’s cousin.

When I visited, a few of the residents were lounging on the front porch, looking bored. J.A.V. requires abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and enforces a regimen of daily prayer. On a sheet of paper taped to the wall of the common room were the Ten Commandments of the house (“No fighting”; “No food for lazy mon”). Blahyi told me, “No matter how much my name go all over the world, without destroying the possibility of another Butt Naked, I count myself a failure.”

Emmette and Eugene Gray, identical twins who lived at the J.A.V. house, fought alongside General Butt Naked for a few months in 1996. “We were little boys,” Emmette, the more outgoing of the two, told me. “We didn’t know nothing about war, but we were very happy to be into it because I don’t have a family, I don’t have food to eat, I don’t have nowhere to stay.”

When Blahyi disbanded his unit, many of the soldiers were left without a reliable source of food or shelter. Emmette and Eugene were orphans, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast. In 1999, when the Liberian civil war reignited, Eugene returned and joined the Liberian military. Emmette stayed in the refugee camp, where he was recruited by a rebel group. His unit crossed into Liberia and began fighting Taylor’s forces. The brothers never faced each other in combat, but each told me that he would have killed the other without hesitation.

“We would have to pull the trigger,” Emmette said.

“He on the opposite side, fighting against me,” Eugene said. “If we capture him on the front line and they tell me, ‘This man’s your brother. Kill him’—what am I going to do? I don’t want to die. I will aim straight and use a bullet on him.”

“Straight, one bullet,” Emmette said, nodding.

After the war, the twins reunited in Monrovia and participated in the U.N.’s rehabilitation campaign. Emmette enrolled in a software-programming class, but the instructor stopped showing up. Soon the twins were homeless. “I became a drug addict,” Emmette said. “Every day, I steal to smoke drugs.”

Desperate for shelter, they made their way to Palm Grove Cemetery, a sprawling graveyard in Monrovia. They emptied two graves and slept inside them. “We took out the casket with the body in it, cleaned the entire place, and covered the area with a tarp,” Emmette said. “I lived there, I slept there, I ate there.” They stayed for three years.

In 2012, Blahyi found the twins in the cemetery and invited them to join J.A.V., but they rebuffed him. “You are the one who put us into the war when we were very little,” Emmette told Blahyi. “After that, you completely abandoned us.” A few weeks later, Blahyi sponsored a beach barbecue for former fighters, and the twins attended, playing volleyball and eating hot dogs. Returning to the cemetery that night, Emmette was unable to sleep. He left Palm Grove and searched for Blahyi’s house, asking for directions as he went. Around 4 A.M., he knocked on Blahyi’s door and said, “I cannot go back to where I came from.” He stayed with Blahyi for a few months, then moved into the J.A.V. house. It was the first time in years that he had slept on a mattress.

Eugene stayed behind in Palm Grove. One day, Emmette returned to the cemetery, hoping to persuade his brother to join him in Chocolate City. During the war, the twins had used a special whistle to find each other when they became separated. It was a sound both knew well: the descending shriek of an incoming mortar round. Emmette walked among the graves and whistled until Eugene whistled back.

Eugene was not ready to forgive Blahyi. “The guy just left here without telling us,” Eugene said. “Now he come around again with another story.” But the brothers kept talking, and eventually Eugene agreed to follow Emmette to Chocolate City. Emmette told me, “The one who put me in the war is the one who come and save me.” [cartoon id="a19363"]

After his conversion, Blahyi lived in Monrovia, in a shabby apartment with exposed wiring. First, he worked as a bodyguard for a bank official; then he sold cassettes of his sermons on the street. His theological message was simple and personal: If God can save me, He can save you, too.

In 1997, Charles Taylor was elected President, campaigning on the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him.” The phrase was darkly ironic: Taylor was claiming to be the only leader powerful enough to prevent another war. But, once in office, he used the military to hound his enemies, including Blahyi. Fearing for his safety, Blahyi fled to Ghana, where, for much of the next ten years, he lived in a refugee camp. He learned to read and write, studied the Bible, and delivered sermons in the camp and throughout Africa. The camp was full of Liberians displaced by the war. “They wanted revenge,” Blahyi told me. “They said, ‘You made us come here. What are you doing among us?’ ”

In early 2008, when the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings began, many former warlords were called to participate. At first, most of them refused, including Charles Taylor, who was facing trial in The Hague. (He was later convicted of war crimes for his role in the civil war in Sierra Leone.) Prince Johnson, a former rebel commander, had been captured on video ordering his men to torture President Doe; now a senator, he warned that violence might break out if he were forced to appear before the commission.

“It was a very sensational appearance,” Lansana Gberie, an expert on conflict resolution from Sierra Leone, told me. “Out of the blue, you had Joshua Blahyi come in and make himself bigger than he was during the war. What he did was use the T.R.C. to launch his career as a showman, as someone who wants to be famous—war famous.”

In Monrovia, I met Mohammed Toure, a slim, gravel-voiced man who works in the diamond business. As a high-level rebel commander, he had seen Blahyi in action during the April 6th battle. Blahyi was “a notorious killer,” Toure acknowledged. “He chopped up people. They don’t stay alive.” However, when I raised Blahyi’s claim of having been responsible for twenty thousand deaths, Toure was incredulous. “That is a lie,” he said. “He couldn’t even reach one thousand—it’s not possible.”

Nicholai Lidow, the independent scholar, told me that Blahyi was merely “a platoon-size commander. He probably never had more than forty people under his command.” If two hundred thousand people died during twelve years of fighting, it seemed implausible that one platoon of fighters, active for about three years, was responsible for ten per cent of the death toll.

When I proposed to Blahyi that evidence for his death count seemed scant, he said, “I wish it was nobody at all. I wish it was an overstatement.”

Blahyi’s childhood tenure as a tribal “high priest”—a key part of his conversion narrative—also seems far-fetched. David Brown, a social anthropologist who has worked in Liberia since the nineteen-seventies, said that he had never heard of a secret society that matches Blahyi’s description. I spoke with many other experts who agreed; one called Blahyi’s story “ludicrous.”

Blahyi also told a few of his patrons that Steven Spielberg met him in Monrovia and offered him nine hundred thousand dollars for the rights to his life story—and that he had turned down the offer, because the director wanted to temper the religious aspects of his biography. Later, I asked Marvin Levy, Spielberg’s spokesman, about the deal. “Steven has never heard of it,” Levy said.

One afternoon at the J.A.V. house in Chocolate City, a half-dozen young men sat in front of a TV watching “Missing,” an American series about a former C.I.A. operative searching for her disappeared son. “I will do anything to get my boy,” she said to a corrupt police official. After a while, a bus pulled up, and the boys rode with Blahyi to the airport to greet Brenda Weber, one of J.A.V.’s financial backers. Weber, a devout Christian from Walnut, Illinois, was travelling with her sister and brother-in-law, Beverly and Dan Jakubek, both Pentecostals from Washington State. Two of the J.A.V. residents—Dauda Watson, slender and soft-spoken, and Prince William, an irrepressibly upbeat young man whose nickname was No Bad Day—carried a banner that read “Welcome Our Sweet Mothers & Dad Dan to Liberia. We love you!”

Weber, who is fifty-three, manages a small pharmacy with her husband. After seeing “The Redemption of General Butt Naked,” a feature documentary about Blahyi, she contacted him on Facebook, where he has nearly five thousand friends from all over the world. They talked several times on the phone. “I could just tell that he was genuine,” she told me. “I knew that he wasn’t the same person, that he was a totally different man.” In 2012, she founded a small nonprofit to support Blahyi’s work. She provided most of the money to rent the house in Chocolate City, and to buy food, bunk beds, and supplies.

Weber grew enamored of the former soldiers, who nicknamed her Mama Brenda. Weber, who is benevolent but sometimes tin-eared, told me, “You should see them when someone cares, especially a white woman from America. It makes them feel like they are worth something for the first time in years.” She often says that she and Blahyi intend to “clean out the ghetto.”

Liberia’s main airport was badly damaged during the war; passengers arrive through a repurposed cargo building. Weber and the Jakubeks emerged from the terminal, and the young men rushed forward, clapping and singing. Dauda Watson rested his head on Weber’s chest. Another young man hugged her, lifting her off her feet. On the bus back to Chocolate City, Blahyi led the group in a short prayer. Then Dan Jakubek, ruddy and tall, rose from his seat and faced the young men. “I want you to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is something much greater than us coming here,” he said. “God told me he’s looking for a Joshua generation—not a Joshua Blahyi but a Joshua generation. That generation that went into the Promised Land.”

“Thank you, Daddy!” the men shouted. They surged toward the front of the bus, and Jakubek laid his hands on each one’s head. “Bless you in Jesus’ name,” he said.

The next day, Weber unpacked duffelbags full of gifts: T-shirts, bottles of cologne, video games, refurbished laptops loaded with Christian educational software. A few of the men bickered over the gifts, but they quickly settled their disputes. “You can see how far they’ve come,” Weber said, smiling. Someone set off a string of firecrackers, which sounded like gunfire. Grinning, Blahyi yelled, “Move it!”—his battle cry from the war.

Beginning in 2012, Weber sent Blahyi around eight hundred dollars a month. Half is meant to cover food for the program; the other half is for Blahyi. (Other American donors give money that goes to Blahyi and his staff. The average Liberian earns thirty-eight dollars a month.) After a year, Weber had wiped out her family’s forty-thousand-dollar savings—a fact that, as of her trip to Liberia, she hadn’t shared with her husband. At one point, Weber took out a fifty-thousand-dollar line of credit and sold some of her Coach handbags at a garage sale. “I know everything’s going to be fine,” she told me. “You can’t give and give like that and not get something in return.”

Even with Weber’s support, J.A.V. seemed to be foundering. One of the residents had stolen some of the plastic chairs from Blahyi’s church and sold them. Despite the religious strictures, gonorrhea was a recurring problem. Some of Weber’s money had been used to enroll the young men in driving classes; they all completed the course, and J.A.V. threw a graduation party, with balloons and cake. But to become a professional driver in Monrovia you need a commercial license—not to mention a car—and Blahyi had no plans to provide either. One of the young men, Abraham Fahnbulleh, told me that he and his housemates needed jobs “to get us busy, so that we cannot think about our past.”

At one point, another resident of the house pulled me aside and told me that Blahyi was misappropriating the program’s money for his own benefit: “The administration is run by his entire family, and no one really questions it.” Sometimes, the young man added, the residents of the house went without breakfast, or their meals consisted of plain rice with salt and pepper. When Western reporters arrive, “Blahyi and his staff say, ‘O.K., stand in front of this camera and tell the man, “We are Joshua Blahyi beneficiaries.” ’ But what have I benefitted?”

When one of the residents texted Weber to report that they weren’t being fed breakfast, she started sending an additional three hundred dollars a month. Blahyi hadn’t told her about the problem, she believed, out of concern for her finances. “I wholeheartedly trust Joshua,” she went on. “If he ever makes a mistake, it’s not willfully.”

Blahyi denied that he had misappropriated funds and disputed the notion that his program had failed to impart marketable skills. “The men are all drivers,” he said, referring to the training class they had completed. He claimed that, in addition to receiving money from Weber and other benefactors, he supported J.A.V. with proceeds from his books and donations from his preaching. Though he had reneged on some promises to his recruits, he said, “The guys are very young. They are infants in reasoning. I know what is good for them.”

In 2009, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued a five-hundred-page report. It called for the creation of a war-crimes court with the power to bring charges, and recommended the prosecution of a hundred and sixteen of the war’s “most notorious perpetrators,” including Prince Johnson. The report also suggested that forty-nine politicians who had supported rebel factions—including Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who has been the President of Liberia since 2006—be banned from holding public office for thirty years. (Johnson Sirleaf had admitted to providing ten thousand dollars to Charles Taylor early in the war.)

Near the end of the report, the commission recommended pardoning thirty-eight people who, despite having committed human-rights violations, “spoke truthfully before the Commission and expressed remorse for their prior actions.” The first two names on the list were Eugene and Emmette Gray. The fourth was Joshua Blahyi.

Some Liberians applauded the T.R.C. for censuring war criminals. But others had trouble understanding why the report recommended such harsh punishment for those, like President Johnson Sirleaf, who had committed relatively minor transgressions, while granting pardon to a self-described mass murderer. In the journal African Affairs, Jonny Steinberg, a South African scholar, called the report “a stunning exemplar of moral confusion.”

This debate is largely moot—few of the report’s recommendations have been implemented. In 2011, Liberia’s Supreme Court ruled that the proposal to remove politicians from office was unconstitutional. Creating a war-crimes court in Liberia would require the approval of the legislature—in which Prince Johnson and other former warlords still serve—and would result in the prosecution of a sizable portion of the country’s rulers. Many Liberians, now enjoying relative security, fear that such an overhaul could plunge the country back into conflict. In a confidential cable later released by WikiLeaks, the U.S. Ambassador to Liberia wrote that the T.R.C.’s report “reflects the split in Liberian society between those who desire restorative justice and those who seek reconciliation.”

What to make of a man who appears to have exaggerated his misdeeds in pursuit of fame and forgiveness? A flawed savior, one could argue, is better than none at all. But Blahyi has often appeared proud, if not hubristic—an unsettling pose for a penitent. When one of the commissioners asked him why he had agreed to testify, he cited his “favorite Biblical passage,” John 8:32—“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”—before plugging one of his books.

Tina Susman, who was among the first Western journalists to write about Blahyi after his conversion, told me, “I covered a lot of warlords. After a war is over, they have to reinvent themselves. That’s how they survive.” She believed that Blahyi had anticipated the public’s desire for an enticing narrative. “They want something to grab on to, whether they’re regular people looking for a miracle or journalists looking for a good story.”

Blahyi is mercurial and shrewd, but his faith seems sincere. At one point, while I was staying at his house, I awoke at 4 A.M. to hear him praying quietly in the dark. Gberie, the scholar from Sierra Leone, said, “Who else in Liberia is getting this attention, except the President, who is a Nobel Prize winner? That’s quite an achievement for a small-time thug.”

The late Stephen Ellis, a British historian who wrote about the Liberian civil war, once told me that he found much of Blahyi’s story dubious, but he understood its appeal. Blahyi’s conversion narrative was “in the evangelical tradition of the repentant sinner who stands up and says, ‘I was a thief, I was a drunkard, I did all these terrible things and then I discovered Christ,’ ” he said. “And the bigger sinner you were, then the greater your repentance.”

Before Weber and the Jakubeks returned to the U.S., Blahyi arranged for them to visit Sinoe County, a day’s drive from Monrovia. Some of Blahyi’s distant relatives had donated three thousand acres of dense forest to his missionary organization. He plans to clear it and build a city on a hill, partly funded by Weber, with a medical clinic, a job-training program, and dormitories for four hundred and eighty former child soldiers.

Blahyi had hired a driver and a Land Cruiser. Dan Jakubek came along, as did Gabriel Jalloh, a friend of Blahyi’s from his time in Ghana. About an hour outside Monrovia, the driver stopped at a checkpoint in front of a hundred-thousand-acre rubber plantation owned by Firestone. Millions of rubber trees stood in martial rows, their catchment buckets resembling red fezzes. At the next checkpoint, Blahyi leaned toward the driver’s window and said, “I’m Joshua Milton Blahyi.”

“Ah, man of God,” the guard said, and waved us through.

The asphalt gave way to a dirt road through a rain forest, its canopy wreathed in brume. In one of the villages along the road, Blahyi greeted the local land commissioner, a toothless man in a torn Dolce & Gabbana shirt. In another village, he reached into a black plastic bag full of cash and handed bills to a few residents. After dark, we arrived at a settlement of mud-brick huts in the jungle. Blahyi, grinning widely, greeted a throng of women and children—some of whom were members of his extended family.

The next morning, a rainy Sunday, we set out to tour the property. We drove for a few miles before encountering an impenetrable wall of jungle. “This is where we should start the guesthouse,” Blahyi said. “This project is very massive. It’s something that is . . .”

“Unprecedented,” Jalloh said.

“We’re going to have schools for the children in the community,” Blahyi added. There would be a computer center and running water and generators to supply power. Missionaries would visit from the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Blahyi told Jakubek, “The whole Bible college is going to be named after you.”

“What a God’s gift,” Jakubek said.

Finally, we reached a hamlet of zinc-roofed shanties and parked in front of a small church. A group of men sat beneath a tree, drinking beer. A sign near the entrance to the church—a dim structure with a dirt floor—advertised “Sunday Service,” but only a handful of people had gathered in the pews.

One of the church’s leaders, who had been among those drinking under the tree, came inside, walking a little unsteadily. Blahyi admonished him for the paltry attendance.

“It started raining,” he said.

“I don’t think you would give these excuses to Christ,” Jalloh said.

“Yes,” the man said, looking at the dirt floor.

“The reason why I’m bringing these people here is not so that we can get things from white people,” Blahyi added. “We want them to know that this area is possible to change. We need not only their financial help—we also need their experience.”

Blahyi began to deliver a sermon, and about a dozen men and women from the town, along with a smattering of curious children, filed into the church. “When I gave a command, the whole of Monrovia running to implement that command,” Blahyi said. “I’m in a three-story building. It’s not my house. The owner of the house, I put them in the boys’ quarters. I take their house and nobody could ask me question. The owners were drawing water for me, they were washing my clothes. I just want to show you how powerful I was at the time.

“But when I discover Jesus I left all of those things. Because I let those things go, what God has given me? My children are born.” The parishioners began to clap, but Blahyi stopped them. “That’s not the exciting thing. And it’s not material things. That’s not the thing. It’s a name that will never be forgotten in Liberian history.”

“Amen,” the congregation answered. Blahyi finished his sermon and walked outside. The rain had stopped, and the sky was beginning to clear. ♦